Donald T. Sterling, a Los Angeles based attorney, speaks at a May 1981 press conference to announce he had purchased the San Diego Clippers for $13.5 million. LENNY IGNELZI , AP

These aren’t Donald Sterling’s Clippers anymore.

With the $2 billion sale of the team to Steve Ballmer closing Tuesday, Donald Sterling is nothing but a memory to Clippers fans and NBA observers.

Sure, he’ll still try to fight the league that helped make him a much richer man in courts. He says he’ll sue the doctors who testified against him. Maybe his strained relationship with his wife, Shelly, will lead to another trip to the courtroom.

The public’s not done with Sterling yet – but the Clippers are. And here’s why that’s good news for them.

MAY 4, 1981

After moving to San Diego in 1978, the Clippers were the embodiment of pleasantly mediocre. Led by World B. Free, the Clippers were one of the best offensive teams in the NBA, but they were also one of the worst defending squads, leading to a 114-132 record in their first three seasons in town.

Enter Donald Sterling, a wealthy attorney from Los Angeles who made his fortune by buying some of the city’s top rental properties and never selling.

Sterling came into town boasting of big changes.

“I’m enormously happy and thrilled,” Sterling said. “The franchise will stay here in San Diego and we will do everything in our power to bring a winning club to the city.

“…I’m willing to spend whatever it takes to bring San Diego a winner.”

The big changes did come – the team went from mediocre to horrible, and in just over a season, Sterling tried to move the team out of town.

Things would get worse.

JAN. 8, 1982

Who knew Donald Sterling used to be progressive?

More than 30 years before the Philadelphia 76ers brought tanking mainstream, Sterling openly talked about the benefits of losing.

“We have to bite the bullet,” he told reporters in San Diego. “We must end up last in order to draw first and get a franchise-maker like Ralph Sampson.”

The comments cost Sterling $10,000, and the team wasn’t bad enough for the plan to work, finishing with the fourth-worst record in the league.

Instead of Sampson, they drafted Byron Scott, but didn’t pony up to sign him, sending him to the Lakers in a package that netted Norm Nixon. Scott excelled, Nixon got injured and the losing, whether intentional or not, continued.

JUNE 7, 1982

“The franchise will stay here in San Diego.”

Um, about that ...

After just one season in San Diego, Donald Sterling announced his plans to move the Clippers north to Los Angeles. Representing him as he made his argument to the NBA? Maxwell Blecher, one of the lawyers who failed to help Sterling triumph over his wife in probate court 30-plus years later.

The NBA blocked the move, at least until 1984, when Sterling signed a deal to move the club to the Sports Arena, citing increases in ticket sales and television money.

He was right about those things – just not right away.

JUNE 27, 1988

Elgin Baylor was on top of the world. The team took the best college player in the country, Danny Manning, and landed two more all-Americans via trade in Michigan’s Gary Grant and Pitt’s Charles Smith.

“I can’t think of any team in the history of basketball that had a better draft than we did today,” he said.

With expectations reasonable, what could go wrong?

Um, try this.

In the aftermath of the Sterling scandal this past spring, Franz Lidz, who profiled Sterling in 2000 (more on this to come), told the story of how Danny Manning signed his contract.

“Shortly after the Clippers made Danny Manning the top pick of the 1988 NBA draft, team owner Donald Sterling invited the player and his agent, Ron Grinker, to talk contract in Beverly Hills,” Lidz wrote. “It was recounted to me how Sterling lounged around his mansion in a bathrobe open to his navel, wearing nothing underneath.

“At one point Sterling’s preteen son wandered in and was chastised for skipping Hebrew school. The owner commanded the boy, ‘Go to your room and get undressed.’ The child slouched upstairs. Sterling followed. The next thing Manning heard was a belt thrashing and the boy wailing, as Grinker bounded up the stairs yelling, ‘Stop! Stop! We'll sign.’

Manning would go on to tear ligaments in his knee as a rookie, eventually recovering to lead the Clippers to back-to-back playoff appearances.

But before the Clippers had a chance to sign Manning to a big contract, they sent him to Atlanta for an aging Dominique Wilkins (he played only 25 games with the team) and a first-round pick they later squandered.

APRIL 17, 2000

Donald Sterling and the Clippers finally made it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated. The fact that the headline read “The worst franchise in sports (and the man responsible)” took a little luster off the achievement.

The Clippers had gone from playing in an empty Sports Arena to playing in an empty Staples Center

In Lidz’s piece, Sterling is painted sympathetically (as far as Donald Sterling profiles go) with the worst of it (the Manning story) being spiked by SI at the time. Mostly, it portrayed him as a cost-cutting, winning-allergic, savvy elitist who had no clue how to run a sports team.

If the story ran today, these would be the nicest words written about a man who was recently voted “Most Hated Man in America.”

JULY 11, 2008

The best Clippers players never wanted to be Clippers.

For most of the team’s time in Los Angeles, this was gospel.

If you were a good player and wearing a Clippers uniform, it was because you either were drafted by the team or you got traded there.

It was like going to the DMV; you were there only because you had to be.

But after the Clippers gave five years and $65 million to hometown star Baron Davis, things were going to be different.

Davis’ career nosedived in Los Angeles, as he wasn’t the star the Clippers hoped, and wouldn’t you know it, Donald Sterling wasn’t happy.

Sterling heckled his marquee player, griping about his shot selections on the court and his menu choices off the floor.

Things got so bad, the Clippers had to send a first-round pick to Cleveland just to unload the final two-plus years of his contract.

Of course, that pick turned out to be No. 1 overall in the 2011 draft, robbing people of the chance to watch Donald Sterling yell at Kyrie Irving.

2009

In February, former general manager Elgin Baylor sued Sterling for racial and age discrimination. Baylor accused Sterling of being unwilling to pay for high-priced African-American players (years later, he’ll be accused of not wanting to pay high price for a white player, J.J. Redick). Sterling would eventually win the lawsuit. This gem from Baylor also later surfaced in court filings. “During this same period, players Sam Cassell, Elton Brand and Corey Maggette complained to me that DONALD STERLING would bring women into the locker room after games, while the players were showering, and make comments such as, ‘Look at those beautiful black bodies.’ I brought this to Sterling’s attention, but he continued to bring women into the locker room.”

In June, Donald Sterling is profiled by ESPN The Magazine’s Peter Keating, and it’s blisteringly damaging. In the story, accusations of housing discrimination are unearthed in graphic detail. Sterling’s predilection for paying for sex is also mentioned in detail. For some, it was an eye-opening read. For others, including some inside the organization, it was just catching the public up to what they already knew.

In November, Sterling settled a federal lawsuit accusing severe racial discrimination in his apartment buildings. Sterling paid out $2.73 million. It’s the second significant payout from Sterling in housing discrimination lawsuits in less than a decade.

MARCH 14, 2011

Despite vows to the contrary, Donald Sterling’s reputation as a penny-pinching owner dates to his first days in the NBA, when he asked his first head coach, Paul Silas, if he was able to tape up the team’s players pregame. The plan, according to Lidz, would allow Sterling to get rid of the team’s trainer.

That kind of misering can be laughed off. This kind cannot.

In Racine’s Journal Times, Gery Woelfel reported on Maggette and an act of kindness he undertook with the help of teammates Chris Kaman, Elton Brand and Marko Jaric in 2004.

The group paid for a $70,000-plus surgery for Kim Hughes, who was suffering from an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

Hughes just happened to be an assistant coach with the Clippers, and, as it turns out, his insurance wouldn’t cover the cost of the procedure.

“Those guys saved my life,” Hughes said to Woelfel. “They paid the whole medical bill. It was like $70,000 or more. It wasn't cheap.

“It showed you what classy people they are. They didn't want me talking about it; they didn't want the recognition because they simply felt it was the right thing to do.”

APRIL 25, 2014

The housing discrimination, the crude sexual conduct, the cost-cutting, the lying and the losing couldn’t do what V. Stiviano did – bring down Donald Sterling.

Sterling and Stiviano, his alleged mistress, became household names after TMZ published an audio recording where Sterling espouses racist views. Sterling’s team contends the recording was illegal, a private conversation in a private home.

The public, though, was outraged with his words.

“Why are you taking pictures with minorities?”

“People feel certain things. Hispanics feel certain things towards blacks. Blacks feel certain things towards other groups. It’s been that way historically, and it will always be that way.”

“Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to … broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?”

“I don’t want you to have hate. That’s what people do; they turn things around. I want you to love them – privately. In your whole life, everyday you can be with them. Every single day of your life… But why publicize it on the Instagram and why bring it to my games?”

“How about your whole life, everyday, you could do whatever you want. You can sleep with (blacks), you can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that and not to bring them to my games.”

Sponsors fled as the Clippers and Sterling became the biggest story in the country. He was banned for life from the NBA days later. He was fined $2.5 million. He was sure to lose his team.

Somehow, Donald Sterling’s apology interview with Anderson Cooper went worse than the original audio recording.

Eventually, Shelly Sterling would have her husband removed as a trustee after two doctors found him mentally incapacitated, clearing the way for her to sell to Ballmer.

Her methods were held up in court, and with a judge’s blessing, the sale has gone through.

It’s not over for Sterling; he’ll still fight those who he thinks have wronged him.

But as far as the Clippers are concerned, he’s gone – 33 years of embarrassments, of gaffes, of disgraces are over.

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